The Endless King Read online

  Contents

  Prologue – Hinge

  1 Familiar Ground

  2 Another Country

  3 The Point of Lighthouses

  4 The Terrible Secret of Abigail Falx

  5 A Better Question

  6 Demands

  7 Battlefield

  8 A Different Prison

  9 Compromised

  10 Army of One

  11 Glimpse

  12 When the Rust Gets In

  13 Ghost Stories

  14 The Backswing Before the Blow

  15 Teeth of the Gear

  16 Retreat

  17 In Current Company

  18 One of These Things is Not Like the Other

  19 We Bury Ourselves

  20 As Above, So Below

  21 Trajectory

  22 Prey Animals

  23 Inevitable

  24 War’s End

  25 The Turn

  26 The Full Set

  27 There are Little Kingdoms

  28 It Takes a Village

  29 No Man’s Land

  30 Who Else?

  31 Rout

  32 The Endless King

  33 Capable

  34 The Borrowed Dark

  35 Ready

  Epilogue – Sunrise

  A Final Secret About Writers …

  Lexicon: A Glossary of Names

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ‘You have no idea what real war is … but you’re going to find out.’

  There’s nothing like an apocalypse to kick off the school year.

  Denizen Hardwick has travelled to Daybreak, the ancestral home of the Order of the Borrowed Dark, to continue his training as a knight. But lessons have barely begun before an unexpected arrival appears with news that throws the fortress into uproar.

  The Endless King has fallen, his dark realm rising in a brutal civil war. When the conflict strikes closer to home, Denizen and his friends face their greatest challenge yet. For if Daybreak falls, so does the world …

  The spellbinding conclusion to the award-winning Knights of the Borrowed Dark trilogy.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dave Rudden has performed in over four hundred schools, libraries and universities since the launch of Knights of the Borrowed Dark in 2016. He enjoys extinction-level events, putting things in his beard and being cruel to fictional children.

  Follow or book Dave Rudden at

  Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram

  @d_ruddenwrites

  @theruddlesstravelled

  #KOTBD

  Knights of the Borrowed Dark series:

  KNIGHTS OF THE BORROWED DARK

  THE FOREVER COURT

  THE ENDLESS KING

  Praise for Knights of the Borrowed Dark:

  ‘Scary and funny – my two favourites. Dave Rudden is more than a rising star, he is a shooting star’

  Eoin Colfer

  ‘Clear some time in your schedule before you read this, because once you start it is very difficult to stop’

  Joseph Fink, Welcome to Nightvale

  ‘The stuff of nightmares in the best possible way’

  Heat magazine

  ‘Wonderful style. Reminded me of Douglas Adams’

  R. L. Stine

  ‘This debut … is action-packed, atmospheric and powerfully imagined. But it is most notable for writerly wit and unexpected turns of phrase … this is engaging storytelling for any age’

  Sunday Times

  ‘Marvellous dialogue and prose, in much the same style as Derek Landy and Darren Shan’

  SFX

  ‘Dave Rudden writes brilliantly: his sentences are full of surprises, his ideas are shiny and fluid or sharp and shocking. He jabs at you with his language choices and makes you sit up and think, Crikey! He puts you deep inside the characters. This book reads beautifully: it keeps moving quickly between places, people, events, strangeness. You get thrown around and left a bit dizzy – in a good way’

  Times Educational Supplement

  ‘An immersive fantasy shot through with dark humour’

  Bookseller magazine

  ‘Etheric, beautifully grotesque, immensely satisfying descriptions’

  The LA Review of Books

  ‘Rudden is an author to watch. Knights of the Borrowed Dark is a pacy, entertaining read, but it has heart too’

  Guardian

  ‘This book will have you running from your shadow and fleeing from the darkness of your imagination’

  Mr Ripley’s Enchanted Books blog

  For my parents

  ‘No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than and yet as mortal as us. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger and yet across the gulf of space intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.’

  H. G. Wells, War of the Worlds

  ‘Long live the King.’

  Anonymous

  PROLOGUE

  Hinge

  ‘And they all lived happily ever after.’

  Theo closed the book with a snap, flashing his audience a bright, wide smile. They did not smile back.

  The silence stretched painfully. Theo’s smile began to tremble at the edges. There was something horribly hungry about the eyes of children, which was why he had spent most of his life enjoying how his presence made them look at the floor.

  Up until …

  Stop it, he thought, squashing the memory before it could unfold. Squashed was an apt description for his audience as well: not one of them older than four, legs kicking off the edge of their chairs with the irritating squeak of baby fat on plastic.

  The chairs were silly. Everything in this room was either too small or comically oversized. Personally, Theo saw neither the educational nor entertainment value of a thirty-centimetre-long pencil, and there was absolutely no reason to have this many different colours of crayon. Could the teachers not just ask the children to draw solely blue things? Or grey things? Then everyone could just have a pencil. There. He’d just saved the orphanage at least –

  The children were still staring.

  ‘What?’ he said, and waggled the book in the air. ‘They did.’

  One spoke up. ‘Until their deaths.’

  On the shelves, the stuffed animals’ grins stretched sinisterly against their zips. Theo’s mouth went dry. ‘What?’

  ‘Mr Colford said that it used to be different,’ another piped up. ‘He said it used to be: They lived happily ever after, until their deaths.’

  ‘He thays accurathy’s imporfant,’ another mumbled.

  I am surrounded by idiots, Theo thought, and these half-cooked bread rolls in front of him weren’t even the worst of it.

  ‘And right he is,’ Theo responded, sagging smile floating on his grim features like an oil slick on a duck pond. It didn’t matter. The point was, he was trying. He’d been trying ever since –

  ‘Accuracy. Right. Very good.’

  ‘Pigs don’t live very long,’ another of the creatures – no, children – murmured, and suddenly a spirited discussion broke out as to whether talking animals meant magical animals, and whether the magic would make them live longer or not.

  ‘Yes,’ Theo said, face now so rigid it was starting to hurt. ‘Fascinating! Maybe draw a picture of it!’

  He unfolded from the ludicrously small chair and stalked past Miss O’Keefe, who had been watching with the smallest of smiles on her wrinkled face.

  ‘Would you like the pictures sent up to your office when they’re done, Theo?’ she said as he passed.

  Director Theodore Ackerby’s smile twi
tched. ‘Of course.’

  He tried very hard not to slam the door on the way out.

  This was your idea, he reminded himself as he made his way through the corridors of Crosscaper Orphanage. And it had been. Gone were his hallways of soothing green and beige; now they were a riotous patchwork of brightly coloured murals painted by the students – regardless of talent. Each door was a different colour, windows festooned with stickers – which are never going to come off – and the only consolation was that with the children doing all the work he hadn’t had to pay them a cent.

  The air was full of the dry buzz of fluorescent lights. Expensive fluorescent lights. None of the teachers had questioned why someone so typically … frugal had suddenly decided to outfit every centimetre of the once-dim orphanage with lamps, not to mention the giant spotlights that covered the entire courtyard. When all were turned on – and they were turned on, every one of them, every night – there wasn’t a scrap of darkness within the orphanage walls.

  It was the only way they could get the children to sleep.

  ‘Theo!’

  He had almost made it to his office. The voice belonged to Mr Gilligan, the science teacher, who had the sort of wide, gormless grin that camouflaged a razor-sharp sense of humour. Ackerby sighed, and prepared himself.

  ‘Theo, I was just wondering … Yes, sorry, Theo, I was just wondering: this new marking scheme I was thinking of implementing, Theo, I thought it would be good if …’

  Mr Gilligan’s voice faded to white noise, punctuated far too often by the sound of Ackerby’s first name. He’d revealed it at the same time as he’d traded his suits for bright, itchy jumpers, and the calming austerity of his corridors for a thousand circus shades.

  Familiarity. Safety. That’s what was needed. Ackerby had read books on the subject. The Incident had driven away half the staff. The children had been terrified. So much destruction, so many repairs, the courtyard – he had needed to adapt. They all had.

  So he was Theo now, and he wore a smile, no matter how much it tortured the muscles of his face.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, when the assault ceased. ‘Whatever you think is best. Now, if you don’t mind –’

  A light flickered overhead.

  There were moments, near-invisible moments, that your life swung on like a hinge. A bike tyre skidding on ice, a missed flight, a foot slipping off a step before regaining its balance. Or not. Every life had them, waiting like the secret flaw in a diamond, where something previously safe could suddenly fracture and shear.

  It had happened to Ackerby before, but he’d not then had the wit to recognize it, and he would never let it happen again, to him or those in his charge.

  Mr Gilligan’s voice washed over him, unheard, unheeded, because the fluorescent tube above their heads was shivering. Not as if the power had been interrupted, or the bulb was about to fail, but as if … invaded, infected by a tiny scrap of night.

  ‘It’s happening again,’ Ackerby whispered.

  ‘What?’ Mr Gilligan said. ‘What are you –’

  The science teacher’s teeth clacked shut as Ackerby pulled himself to his full height. His spine protested – the … the Incident had bent him, shaken him, forced his shoulders into the kind of weak slump any idiot could climb.

  Well. Not again.

  ‘Mr Gilligan!’ His voice struck the colour from the younger teacher’s cheeks. A tiny, satisfied part of Ackerby imagined the disappearance of every child’s smile within earshot. ‘Assemble the other teachers. Empty the classrooms. Take the children down to the bunker –’

  A grand name for the basement, but it had concrete walls and a thick door and it was underground, and that was what mattered.

  ‘– and defend them with your life. With all of your lives. Do you understand?’

  Mr Gilligan’s jaw had dropped. ‘But Theo –’

  Ackerby’s growl could have silenced the sea. ‘Director.’

  Mr Gilligan bolted.

  It didn’t take long for the orphanage to snap into action. The director had spent enough time drilling it into them, after all, and, despite their utter mediocrity, they had learned their lessons well.

  That hadn’t been surprising. Some bad dreams you never forgot.

  Doors slammed open, trickles of wide-eyed children becoming a flood, all heading downstairs. The director strode against the tide, glaring into the eyes of each teacher he passed as if to tattoo his orders on the inside of their heads. As much as they annoyed him he knew he could trust them, simply because they were the ones who had stayed. The others …

  Disgusting.

  Theo had spent his whole life in places like this. You didn’t just abandon them when things took a turn for the horrible. A turn for the horrible was why places like this existed.

  Bulbs abruptly shook in their fittings, the corridor pulsing through a rainbow of sickly shades. The children began to run, and the director waited until the last of them had disappeared round the corner before he did the same.

  The snarl of slamming wood followed him, though not a single door moved as he passed. Carpet hairs stood as stiff as needles under his feet. If the director had allowed even a single clock within Crosscaper’s walls, he was sure it would be ticking out of time.

  The spotlights. The director had been a coward when horror had come to these corridors, and he was fairly sure he was one now, which was why he’d reduced the requirements of bravery down to the single flick of a switch.

  These things moved in darkness. Now let them choke on the light.

  His office doors were open. They were never open. He tried to stop, but the momentum of adrenalin and terror forced him over the threshold before his old bones ground to a halt. Outside the windows, the sky was weeping, raindrops pummelling the glass as if desperate to escape.

  There was a figure standing behind his desk.

  ‘No,’ Ackerby whispered. ‘It can’t be. Not … not you.’

  Denizen Hardwick gave him a bleak little wave.

  ‘Director. I need your help.’

  1

  Familiar Ground

  Some time earlier

  They approached from the air.

  Cloud broke before the plane like waves round a prow, and Denizen Hardwick pressed his long nose against the window because it seemed that in his absence someone had stolen the ground away. In its place was another night sky, rising to meet their descent.

  Lights. Millions and millions of tiny lights, and all Denizen could think was that constellations had always been a bit of a romantic notion to him – just people looking for pictures in stars a billion miles apart. This pattern had order, though, a sprawling, organic order, like the pinprick skeleton of a beast he couldn’t see.

  A city.

  Walls and towers and narrow streets draped in seaweed tangles across a huge mountain peak, outlined by glittering coral colonies of gold. The plane shuddered as it dived, and Denizen realized that he knew that glow. He’d been living by it for nearly a year now.

  Candles. How many must there be that we can see them from the sky?

  It was like something from a fairy tale. Not a modern myth, scraped clean of darkness, with animal companions and villainous musical numbers. This was a fairy tale with battlements, arrow-slits and murder holes, a story where the bottom of the portcullis was stained with blood.

  In the old tales, villains killed you. In the old tales, fairies took your kids.

  And at the mountain’s summit … a shape. A citadel, dark amid the light.

  Denizen’s mother leaned over from her seat beside him.

  ‘Welcome to the home of the Order of the Borrowed Dark, Denizen. Our first fortress. Our last fortress. The House We Will Hold.’

  There was a rare reverence in Vivian’s voice.

  ‘Welcome to Daybreak.’

  ‘I am never flying again.’

  White as an envelope, Simon Hayes staggered out on to the tarmac, his long limbs heron-hunched inwards as if afraid the slowing propelle
rs might take one of them off.

  ‘You’re hardly going to walk home,’ Denizen said wryly, though he couldn’t deny his own wave of relief when his feet also hit solid ground.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re handling this better than me,’ the taller boy said, his grin robbing the words of any malice. ‘You never handle things better.’

  Denizen mock-scowled. ‘That is …’ He thought for a moment. Between the orphanage of their childhood and the grim mansion of Seraphim Row in which they now resided, the boys had spent less than five weeks not in each other’s pockets. Simon knew more about Denizen than Denizen did. ‘Fine. Well then, I’m owed.’

  He shouldered his bag and glanced around the deserted airfield – little more than a strip of flat tarmac and a couple of sheds, tiny in the gargantuan shadow of Monte Inclavare, Adumbral’s sole peak. Even when Denizen had his back to the mountain, he could feel it bearing down on him, a tidal wave just before the plunge.

  The fractures of his iron eye itched.

  The Order had claimed this country back before it was a country – just a mountain valley in the Apennines, a place the world had long forgotten. Or been encouraged to forget. The Knights had little time for human wars, and Denizen could easily imagine kings coveting this land, only to be met with iron lips and iron words: Leave us alone.

  Abigail swung neatly from the cabin doorway, landing lightly on the tarmac.

  ‘That was fun,’ she said, and laughed at Simon’s less-than-enthusiastic look.

  Monte Inclavare was crowned by the city of Adumbral, and there was a fortress called Daybreak at its heart. This fact was not widely known. Nor was the existence of the Knights who called it home. It had taken Denizen and Simon thirteen years, a near-apocalypse and the violent blossoming of their own magical talents to learn of the Order of the Borrowed Dark, but Abigail Falx had always known her destiny was here.

  ‘So who do you think it’ll be?’ she asked, tying up her dark hair. ‘The Master of Neophytes, I mean. It’s a different Knight every year, you see. There was word Gedeon was retiring, but surely he’d stay in Russia, train an apprentice. Oh my God, what if it’s Gedeon –’